Fearsquare Wonders: Will Crimes Stats Change the Way You Check In?

A lot of New York’s heavy Foursquare users pride themselves on their adventurous and wide ranging check ins. But across the pond, the Lincoln Social Computing Research Center has mashed up public data with Foursquare check ins to show U.K. users what just how dangerous their daily lives, as measured by location based activity, really are.

Dennis Crowley often says that the intention of Foursquare is to get people to interact with the real world, and the the check in is not a means to an end, but a jumping off point for inspiring new behaviors. This study is sort of the opposite, testing to see if users will limit their activity based on negative inputs.

After checking in, users are show data about how many robberies, violent crimes and “anti-social” crimes occurred in that vicinity over the most recent one month period. And just like Foursquare, users can see where they rank on leaderboard, in this case measuring the total number of fear points they have collected from checking in to dangerous locales.

There have been some interesting Foursquare hacks in NY that worked along similar themes. Max Stoller’s DontEat.at, which lets users know about any health code violations when they check into a restaurant, took home the student prize at this year’s Big Apps competition.

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